So far the existing reports and queries are quite intuitive and clean, but compared to other more advanced reporting systems, the following most important features are still missing:
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Drill down, by double clicking summarized figure and switch to another list view showing the underline document list for more easy root cause analysis
Currently there are a lot of well structured and summarized reports such as trial balance, balance sheet, profit and loss, cash flow from accounts module, also purchase/sales trend analysis reports from logistic modules, there is hyperlink on the link field which can directly jump to the relevant master data form to check more details, but for the most important summarized key figure(SAP term, the value and amount) is not clickable, it is just a static number already summarized by the program in the backend, but under most of the cases, the user would like to check the relevant documents list( here the general ledger entry, purchase order, stock ledger entry, sales order etc) to check in more details. In SAP we normally do the analysis this way: run the high level summarized report, e.g P&L, double click the figure , drill down to the accounting document list, single out the accounting document in question, click it to display the document in detail, if still have question, jump to the relevant order or master data, finally check the order or master data change history if needed. all the above mentioned steps and linked, no need to switch to different screen by manually click other menu or input transaction code, also no need to input the filtering conditions!
There is already summary report and document list report which support filtering conditions in the system, the only thing needed is to get the context when clicking the key figure, i.e the content from the other column of the row, the company, the vendor, the date range etc, using this context info as default filtering condition to drill down to the target report!
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Pivot table
Needless to say, Pivot table is another very powerful for analysis, with pivot table capability, it is even not needed to develop so many different reports anymore, user can do ad hoc analysis . -
personalized list layout,(SAP term ALV list layout)
there are a lot of big reports with more than 20 columns, users from different functions are using the same report, normally they have different purpose, the columns they care about and which info is more important for them are different, even though it is quite easy to customize the columns for the report, but creating many different reports with same data source is not a good idea, instead I would suggest to add the feature allowing users define personal or shared list layout: simply define the fields needed in the output and the sequence, save the setting for later use. also can set as default list layout -
Saved filter: (SAP term: selection variant)
same concept as above mentioned list layout, for the filtering conditions, for certain user using a specific report with so many filtering fields, it is tedious to manually key in all the filtering criteria on many fields each time , so this feature is a must also. -
Drag and drop query builder
Odoo’s studio way of drag and drop existing fields or new fields to current list view with live data is very impressive, if it can be implemented the same in ERPNext, it will make ERPNext even more better.